The soup tasted like nothing, but Carina still made the effort to eat, monotonously removing and inserting the spoon in her mouth.
Her mind was in overdrive, hundreds of memories and thoughts clashing together in her head. At least she was doing slightly better than when she first woke up. Now that she had the mild panic attack out of the way, she was able to calm herself down enough to actually get out of bed.
There was this heavy feeling of loss that settled over her the moment she took the time to properly think about her previous life. Even just the fact that she had to admit it was her previous one, it made her heart ache. She missed her family, the feeling of being at home, the warmth that accompanied her whenever she woke up in her house.
The family that she had now, the family that Carina had, it made her feel nothing but cold and alone. That suited her fine, in the end, as she could never properly consider them her family in the first place, but it only made her long for her actual family that much more.
Having one set of memories that knew what it was like to be loved, to be cherished, and then having another set of memories that only knew isolation felt like two sides of her warring against each other.
Carina understood being abandoned fully, made a home in the numbness she felt in waking up and going to sleep alone every night.
In that sense maybe they lived opposite lives.
Carina was utterly and completely alone, she felt as if she lived an existence that was nothing but a burden, a cursed existence that made her unable to be loved, to be cared for. Whoever she was before she became Carina, she knew only what it was to be loved unconditionally, she lived a life filled with warmth and happiness.
Perhaps that's why she was put here, in Carina's body, to begin with. Perhaps she was meant to be here to change Carina's life for the better.
Though, even with the fact that she knew the original Carina was dead and she was now inhabiting her body, it was still hard to acknowledge that she was actually Carina now. It was much easier to treat it as if she was just... a tourist, even if it seemed the universe was trying to do everything they could to convince her otherwise.
Despite how much she remembered from her old life, the one thing that she couldn't seem to remember was her name. She remembered annoying little details like the amount of karate trophies she had lined up in her bedroom, or even the name and number of the street her best friend used to live on, but no matter how much she tried, she couldn't remember her old name.
It was as if the world was forcing her to recognise she had to fully insert herself into the role of Carina Rayburn, that Carina was her name now, and it was the only name she needed.
Obviously, that notion was mostly just met with rejection, but the longer she sat there in Carina's bedroom, in Carina's night gown, in Carina's body, she knew she couldn't keep denying that this was her identity now.
"Fuck." Carina muttered, in a voice that was mostly still unfamiliar to her.